The transfer of information over computer networks has become an increasingly important means by which institutions, corporations, and individuals do business. Computer networks have grown over the years from independent and isolated entities established to serve the needs of a single group into vast internets which interconnect disparate physical networks and allow them to function as a coordinated system. Currently, the largest computer network in existence is the Internet. The Internet is a worldwide interconnection of computer networks that communicate using a common protocol. Millions of computers, from low end personal computers to high end supercomputers, are connected to the Internet.
The Internet has emerged as a large community of electronically connected users located around the world who readily and regularly exchange vast amounts of information. The Internet continues to serve its original purposes of providing for access to and exchange of information among government agencies, laboratories, and universities for research and education. In addition, the Internet has evolved to serve a variety of interests and forums that extend beyond its original goals. In particular, the Internet is rapidly transforming into a global electronic marketplace of goods and services as well as of ideas and information.
This transformation of the Internet into a global marketplace was driven in large part by the introduction of common protocols such as HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) for facilitating the easy publishing and exchange of information. The Internet is thus a unique distributed database designed to give wide access to a large universe of documents published from an unlimited number of users and sources. The database records of the Internet are in the form of documents known as “pages” or collections of pages known as “sites.” Pages and sites reside on servers and are accessible via the common protocols. The Internet is therefore a vast database of information dispersed across seemingly countless individual computer systems that is constantly changing and has no centralized organization.
Computers connected to the Internet may access pages via a program known as a browser, which has a powerful, simple-to-learn user interface, typically graphical and enables every computer connected to the Internet to be both a publisher and consumer of information. Another powerful technique enabled by browsers are known as hyperlinking, which permits page authors to create links to other pages that users can then retrieve by using simple commands, for example pointing and clicking within the browser. Thus each page exists within a nexus of semantically related pages because each page can be both a target and a source for hyperlinking, and this connectivity can be captured to some extent by mapping and comparing how those hyperlinks interrelate. In addition, the pages may be constructed in any one of a variety of syntaxes, such as Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) or eXstensible Markup Language (XML), and may include multimedia information content such as graphics, audio, and still and moving pictures.
Because any person with a computer and a connection to the Internet may publish their own page on the Internet as well as access any other publicly available page, the Internet enables a many-to-many model of information production and consumption that is not possible or practical in the offline world. Effective search services, including search engines, are an important part of the many-to-many model, enabling information consumers to rapidly and reliably identify relevant pages among a mass of irrelevant yet similar pages. Because of the many-to-many model, a presence on the Internet has the capability to introduce a worldwide base of consumers to businesses, individuals, and institutions seeking to advertise their products and services to consumers who are potential customers. Furthermore, the ever increasing sophistication in the design of pages, made possible by the exponential increase in data transmission rates, computer processing speeds and browser functionality makes the Internet an increasingly attractive medium for facilitating and conducting commercial transactions as well as advertising and enabling such transactions. Because the Internet allows direct identification of and connection between businesses and targeted consumers, it has the potential to be a powerfully effective advertising medium.
The availability of powerful new tools that facilitate the development and distribution of Internet content (this includes information of any kind, in any form or format) has led to a proliferation of information, products, and services offered through the Internet and a dramatic growth in the number and types of consumers using the Internet. International Data Corporation, commonly referred to as IDC, has estimated that the number of Internet users will grow to approximately 320 million worldwide by the end of 2002. In addition, commerce conducted over the Internet has grown and is expected to grow dramatically. IDC estimates that the percentage of Internet users buying goods and services on the Internet will increase to approximately 40% in 2002, and that the total value of goods and services purchased over the Internet will increase to approximately $425.7 billion.
Thus, the Internet has emerged as an attractive new medium for advertisers of information, products and services (“advertisers”) to reach not only consumers in general, but also to enable increased capabilities to identify and target specific groups of consumers based on their preferences, characteristics or behaviors. However, the Internet is composed of an unlimited number of sites dispersed across millions of different computer systems all over the world, and so advertisers face the daunting task of locating and targeting the specific groups or subgroups of consumers who are potentially interested in their information, products and/or services.
Advertisers, rely on search services to help consumers locate the advertisers' sites. Search services, including directories and search engines, have been developed to index and search the information available on the Internet and thereby help users, including consumers, locate information, products and services of interest. These search services enable users, including consumers, to search the Internet for a listing of sites based on a specific keyword topic, product, or service of interest as described by the users in their own language. Because search services are the most frequently used tool on the Internet after email, sites providing search services offer advertisers significant reach into the Internet audience and create the opportunity to target consumer interests based on keyword or topical search requests.
Search services are generally created by search engine providers who electronically review the pages of the Internet and create an index and database based on that review. The search engine providers may offer the search services directly to consumers or may provide the search services to a third party who then provides the search services to consumers. Usually, the databases are created either by crawling the Internet and making a local copy of every page or aspect thereof into a memory device, or by collecting submissions from the providers of the pages (the “Resulting Pages”). This can include static and/or dynamic content, whether text, image, audio, video or still images. Alternatively, only certain aspects of the pages may be copied such as the URL, title or text. Each Resulting Page is indexed for later reference. Thus when a search of the Internet is requested by a user, the search engine does not actually search the Internet in real-time, but rather searches its own index and database for the relevant Resulting Pages (“search results” or “listings”). The search results are then presented to the user as either copies of the actual pages or a listing of pages that may be accessed via hyperlink.
Many known search engines use automated search technology to catalog search results which generally rely on invisible site descriptions known as “meta tags” that are authored by site promoters. Because advertisers may freely tag or have tagged their sites as they choose, many pages are given similar meta-tags, which increase the difficulty of providing relevant search results. In addition, most known search engines rely on their own hierarchy of semantic categories into which indexed pages are categorized. This is a top-down categorization approach where the categories are semantically related irrespective of their commercial or non-commercial nature. Therefore, known search engines do not provide a bottom-up, customizable categorization of search result based upon the page or site's commercial nature and relevance.
Additionally, some advertisers and other site promoters insert popular search terms into their site's meta tags which are not relevant to their pages so that these pages may attract additional consumer attention at little to no marginal cost. Such pages yield many undesirable results and are referred to as “spam pages.” Generally, pages are referred to as “spam” if they include some mechanism for the purpose of deceiving search engines and/or relevance ordering algorithms and may also redirect users towards sites that are not relevant to the user's original search. Many such mechanisms and techniques exist and include, but are not limited to including meta tags that do not reflect the true nature of the page. Usually, spam pages are commercial in nature. That is, they attempt to sell something to users.
Many known search engines are simply not equipped to prioritize results in accordance with consumers' preferences. Known search engines also do not provide any way to determine whether each page in a listing is commercial in nature and to categorize the listing on the basis of the commercial nature of each page. When this is done, the search results can be processed to provide a more useful organization according to the consumer's intent (whether it be to carry out a commercial transaction or to seek information) in initiating the search. For example, a consumer seeking information on a given topic may wish to distinguish pages that are primarily informational in nature from pages that are primarily commercial in nature. In another example, a consumer may wish to distinguish pages that are primarily commercial in nature and relevant to the consumer's request, from unwanted or spam pages.
Moreover, in known search engines, a consumer attempting to locate a site for purchasing goods or services will also be presented with a vast number of sites that might relate to the item but do not facilitate the purchase of that item. Likewise, consumers interested only in locating informational sites for an item will also be presented with many commercial sites for purchasing the item that may not provide the information they are seeking. Therefore, the consumer's desired result pages are hidden among large numbers of pages that do not correspond with the consumer's ultimate goal because known search engines are not able to distinguish either the consumer's intent for the search nor the commercial or non-commercial nature of the search results.
Thus, the known search engines do not provide an effective means for users to categorize the type of search results for which they are looking, informational or commercial, or for advertisers seeking to control their exposure and target their distribution of information to interested consumers. Current paradigms for presenting search results make no page by page distinction between informational and commercial sources of information, and instead mix both types of results depending purely on the relevance assigned to them as responses to the user's original search query.
Known methods used by advertisers to control their exposure and target their distribution, such as banner advertising, follow traditional advertising paradigms and fail to utilize the unique attributes of the Internet's many-to-many publishing model. Furthermore, to the extent that banner ads are found in the search results, they often fail to attract consumer interest because the consumer is looking in a directed manner for search results on that page, not for a banner.
Thus, the traditional paradigms relating to Internet advertising and search engines fail to effectively categorize and deliver relevant information to interested parties in a timely and cost-effective manner. Therefore, consumers must manually sort through all search results to ultimately locate the type of results (commercial or non-commercial) in which they are interested. Because Internet advertising can, however, offer a level of targetability, interactivity, and measurability not generally available in other media, the ability to categorize and clearly present identified sets of commercial and non-commercial results increases consumer satisfaction and facilitates increased economic efficiency by reducing the amount of manual sorting required of users.
Ideally, advertisers should be able to improve their visibility in an Internet search results list so that their pages not only appear prominently in the listing but are not masked by a multitude of other non-commercial pages (see U.S. Pat. No. 6,269,361, incorporated herein by reference). Likewise, consumers should be able to have their search results reliably categorized and clearly presented as either informational or commercial. Without a reliable means to distinguish between commercial and non-commercial pages, known search engines cannot exploit the true potential of the targeted market approach made possible by the Internet.
Thus, the search engine functionality of the Internet needs to be focused in a new direction to facilitate an online marketplace which offers consumers quick, relevant and customizable search results while simultaneously providing advertisers with a reliable, verifiable and cost-effective way to target consumers and position the advertisers' products and services within a listing. A consumer utilizing a search engine that facilitates this on-line marketplace will find companies or businesses that offer the products or services that the consumer is seeking without the distraction of non-commercial pages. Additionally, while the user is seeking strictly informational resources, the user will not be bothered by spam pages or irrelevant commercial pages.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a system and method for examining and categorizing records in a distributed database as commercial or non-commercial records and then presenting those records in response to a database query submitted by a user or network-defined settings.
It is also an object of this invention is to provide users with a customizable search engine that permits users to organize search results listings based upon the commercial nature of the search result and to allow users to specify presentation rules based upon categories and user preferences.
A further object of this invention is to provide search engine service customers with a customizable search engine that permits each search engine service customer to organize search results listings based upon the commercial nature of the search result and to allow the search engine service customer to specify presentation rules for the search results based upon categories and search engine service customer preferences.
It is also an object of the present invention is to provide a system and method for enabling search engine service providers or users to dynamically specify the importance of various transactional criteria and threshold values in order to create a flexible scale of value based on the commercial nature of a record in order to assign a transactional rating and therefore a commercial or non-commercial designation for each record.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a system and method for categorizing and presenting search results by combining a transactional rating with a quality score and a spam score in order to assign a commercial score and then rank or classify such results according to such score.
It is also an object of the present invention to provide a system and method for categorizing documents in a distributed database to create categorized documents by initially assuming all documents are non-commercial, filtering out all commercial documents and placing them in a first category and using the first category as a collection of advertiser prospects for a pay for performance search engine.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a cost-effective system and method for managing the operation of a pay for performance search engine by automatically generating advertiser sales leads by initially categorizing pages as commercial or non-commercial and then further categorizing commercial pages as existing customers or sales leads.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a system and method for categorizing records in a distributed database to identify commercial records and compare those records against a pay for performance search engine's listings in order to further categorize commercial records as either participating advertisers or non-participating advertisers.
A still further object of the present invention is to provide a system and method of sales lead generation for pay for performance search engine advertisers by organizing and presenting non-participating commercial records to a pay for performance search engine sales staff according to dynamically specified criteria.